Just because a man believes something does not make it true. A man may very well believe he is a woman (only a few deep down, given the degree of delusion required to believe such an obvious fiction). But whether he is a woman is the domain of fact and logic. It follows from the objective definition of “woman,” i.e., an “adult female human,” that if the man is not an adult female human, then he is not a woman.
In symbolic logic, one writes it like this: ¬(B(x, P) ⊢ P). Belief in P does not entail (or make true) P. Put another way, it is not the case that x’s belief in P logically entails (or proves) that P is true.
This is a fundamental point in logic and epistemology: belief is not a truth-preserving operator. “x believes P” is a psychological or subjective “fact” about x; it says nothing about the actual truth value of P. This rejects any implicit rule of the form B(x, P) → P as invalid. The truth value of P is instead in the domain of fact and logic, that is, objective correspondence to reality, including biological definitions and the law of identity: A is A. Determining P requires checking whether the individual satisfies the predicate “adult female human,” not whether they hold the belief B(x, P).
The beauty of logic is that there is no appeal to authority, emotion, or the majority. Stating a truth is a straightforward application of: (1) semantic clarity/definitional reasoning by fixing the meaning of the term “woman” analytically; (2) the law of non-contradiction, which it is held that one cannot both be and not be an adult female human in the same respect, regardless of belief; and (3) rejection of subjectivism/relativism about truth in this domain, i.e., truth here is not indexed to individual belief—it is not the case that P is true for x simply because x believes it.
The claim that a man can be a woman is not an unfalsifiable proposition. Claiming that an individual is a woman is not the same species as the claim that, for example, a man has a soul. I cannot prove that a man does not have such a thing as a soul because, by its very nature, the soul is unprovable. It is not an empirical category but a subjective one. But gender is not like a soul. Gender is an empirical (biological) category against which observable evidence may be posed. The evidence encompasses chromosomes, gametes, and reproductive anatomy.
I have noted before that on many lawns in my neighborhood, often accompanied by the flags of transgender allyship, there is a yard sign that reads: “In this house we believe in science.” Those displaying the sign do not appear to understand that a declared belief in science (and one presumes logic) and a Pride Progress flag are mutually exclusive. One must either believe that a man is a woman because he says he is and, therefore, vacate the meaning of “woman” by reducing it to a tautological definition (like a square is a thing we call a square), or he must believe in science, where definitions mean something and are used to accurately and precisely define the thing under examination.
In an attempt to get around this, the queer movement and the academics and professionals they’ve organized perform a linguistic trick: gender and sex are different things. This deception has many beyond queer circles fumbling. What the truth-defenders must recognize is that what the movement means by gender is the recent construct “gender identity,” which in propaganda reduces to “gender” for rhetorical purposes. This move is designed to transform gender into an unfalsifiable category comparable to a soul. Gender identity doctrine is thus a religious-like belief system. Gender identity is a faith-based belief. As such, it escapes the demands of science. Gender identity is to reproductive physiology/biology what intelligent design is to evolutionary biology.
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If gender is classified as a thing akin to the soul, and therefore the doctrine is a quasi-religious one, there is no rational justification for requiring anybody to accept any claim that assumes gender as such or its entailments if accepted as true. Compelling somebody to use preferred pronouns, or an institution or organization to permit males to participate in female-only activities or enter female-only spaces, is no different from compelling a person, institution, or organization to follow the blasphemy or dietary rules of Islam. Compelling such a thing clearly violates a man’s freedom of conscience and is therefore unconstitutional.
If a man wishes to misgender another man by referring to him as a woman, then he is free to do so. But neither the government nor any public institution may compel a man to follow suit. Any government or public institution that disciplines or terminates the employment of a person who refuses to follow the rules of gender identity doctrine breaks foundational law. Moreover, the government or a public institution that permits men in female-exclusive spaces while women are present in those spaces violates the rights of women. It forces a faith-based belief on all women, whether they believe the thing or not.
While the state cannot compel individuals to act in ways that violate their conscience with respect to beliefs, the state can prevent men from entering female-exclusive spaces because men, as an objective matter, are not women. They have to if women’s rights matter. The state can moreover keep sexual deviants away from children by canceling queer programming and taking down the flags of a transgressive cultural and political project. Indeed, it can abolish the rest of the anti-humanist project—curricula that condition white kids to believe that they are responsible for the crimes of their ancestors, and black kids to believe that white kids are their oppressors, and all the rest of it. For the sake of truth and justice, all of it must go.
freedom and reason 